The 1944 Nisei draft at Heart Mountain, Wyoming: Its relationship to the historical representation of the World War II Japanese American evacuation

The 1944 Nisei draft at Heart Mountain, Wyoming: Its relationship to the historical representation of the World War II Japanese American evacuation by Arthur A. Hansen Professor of History and Director of the Oral History Program California State University, Fullerton Statement of Purpose By examining a controversial aspect of the World War II eviction and detention experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry-the drafting of U.S. citizen Nisei from behind barbed wires at a federal internment facility in Wyoming administered by the War Relocation Authority-this brief unit of several-days duration is designed to introduce students to two controversial historiographical issues. The first one involves the changing representation of past reality. The second, and closely related, issue pertains to how historical truths and value judgments are reflective of a society's circumstances and power relations. Since the situation under examination occurred in 1944 during the Japanese American Evacuation- yet achieved renewed prominence within the movement for Japanese American redress between the late 1960s and the present-this unit may be taught profitably in conjunction with either World War II or recent U.S. history. Introduction The teaching unit offers a means of studying a major event in Asian American and U.S. history, the World War II Japanese American Evacuation, that not only invites an investigation into its causes, developments, and consequences, but also induces an appreciation for how the past as a whole is constructed, communicated, and used as a source of identity and empowerment. Too often, students are taught about the details of events like the Japanese American Evacuation without comparable classroom time devoted to placing them into a meaningful historical context and situating them within an appropriate historiographical frame of analysis. While discharging this dual burden, the teaching unit ideally should capitalize on the contested response to the draft at the Heart Mountain center-compliance and dissent-to prod student exploration of the problematic nature of such concepts as loyalty, patriotism, and heroism. In this connection, the roles played at Heart Mountain in 1944 by three "representative" Nisei (Frank Emi, Ben Kuroki, and James Omura) should be catechized. Objectives to examine the perception, widespread within the American public even after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, that the Japanese American Evacuation was justified on the grounds of wartime security, generally humane in its implementation, passively conformed to by Americans of Japanese ancestry, and limited in significance to the period of U.S. participation in World War II; to correlate Asian American historical experiences with U.S. history; to connect the Japanese American Evacuation to the pre- and post-world War II experience of Asian Americans, in general, and Japanese Americans, in particular; 1

to introduce the phenomenon of intracultural variation and demonstrate its significance in terms of a highly stereotyped ethnic community in an acute crisis situation; to sensitize students to a prominent historiographical question (objectivity versus subjectivity), non-traditional forms of evidence (photographs and oral histories), and innovative historical concepts (hegemony/counterhegemony oppression/resistance, history/memory); and to assist students in appreciating that historical study, to be true to the complexity of the past, must embrace such dualities as change and continuity, generalities and particularities, and consensus and conflict. Historical Narrative On 2 November 1944, in the Federal District Court in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Judge Eugene Rice sentenced the seven leaders of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee (FPC) to four years at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas for conspiring to violate the Selective Service Act and for counseling other draft-age Nisei (U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry) at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center to resist military induction. The moving spirit among these convicted men was Frank Seishi Emi, a twenty-year-old Nisei grocer from Los Angeles, California, who was married and the father of two small children. After a four-month internment at California's Pomona Assembly Center, the Emi family transferred to Heart Mountain in northwestern Wyoming in September 1942. One often detention camps in desolate western and southern areas administered by the War Relocation Center (WRA) for evicted West Coast Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II, Heart Mountain reached its peak population of 10,767 by January 1943. The next month, Emi was obliged, like all adults in WRA camps, to fill out a "loyalty" questionnaire. Dismayed by its two most controversial questions - one of which asked: "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States wherever ordered?"-and by news that a segregated army unit of Nisei volunteers was being formed to showcase Japanese American loyalty, Emi responded that "under the present conditions I am unable to answer these questions." He then advised other confused Heart Mountain Nisei to answer likewise. In December, Emi heard an older camp Nisei well versed in the U.S. Constitution proclaim that the government had abridged Nisei rights without due process of law and, therefore, they should cease pursuing appeasement. Consequently, Emi and several other Nisei joined with this spokesman to create the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. The FPC did not galvanize into a viable organization, however, until 20 January 1944. On that date Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced that the army, which in early 1942 declared American Japanese undraftable because of ancestry, had reinstated normal selective service for Nisei as a step toward their regaining full citizenship. By mid-february the FPC was holding regular meetings and by month's end had 275 duespaying members. Frank Emi (whose domestic situation exempted him from being drafted) and the FPCers reacted to the resumption of the draft by noting, suspiciously, that Nisei were treated as citizens only when it was to the government's advantage. They maintained that if the government restored their full citizenship rights they would gladly comply with selective service requirements. Toward this end, the FPC first consulted an attorney about pursuing a test case challenging the application of selective 2

service law to men interned behind barbed wire, and then petitioned President Franklin Roosevelt to clarify their citizenship status. In March-April 1944 the FPC's influence peaked. Not only did the organization gain widespread support for its position, but sixty-four Heart Mountain Nisei refused their preinduction physicals. In early May a federal grand jury indicted all but one of these resisters. Tried as a group in Wyoming's largest mass trial, the sixty-three men were found guilty on June 26 and sentenced to three years in a federal penitentiary. A month later, Frank Emi and the other six FPC leaders were secretly indicted by the same grand jury. Although not waiving their right to a jury trial, like the resisters had, their plight (as indicated earlier) was virtually the same. The day before the Wyoming court convicted the FPC steering committee, it acquitted yet another Nisei on trial for being a party to the alleged conspiracy, thirty-one year old journalist James Matsumoto Omura. Born near Seattle, Washington, Omura served in the 1930s as English-language editor for a string of Japanese vernacular newspapers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In this capacity, he earned the enmity of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) leadership, whom he assailed as frivolous, obsequious flag-wavers and castigated for presuming to speak for all Nisei in spite of their organization's comparatively scanty membership. The bad blood between the JACLers and Omura curdled when he launched the first Nisei magazine of politics and culture, Current Life, in October 1940. In featured editorials for his progressive monthly, Omura berated them regularly through the final published issue of January 1942. By then, owing to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the U.S. declared war on Japan, and this situation set the stage for a showdown between the JACL leadership and James Omura. On 19 February 1942, President Roosevelt, capitulating to pressure by politicians, nativist groups, and influential media figures, signed Executive Order 906 -- purportedly for "military necessity." This document, which authorized the secretary of war to establish military areas "from which any or all persons may be excluded as deemed necessary or desirable," was the instrument by which 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were incarcerated for up to four years in concentration camps like Heart Mountain. Four days after its issuance, James Omura and Fumiko Okuma (the business manager of Current Life to whom Omura was secretly married) appeared in San Francisco at hearings sponsored by a House of Representatives select committee chaired by Congressman John Tolan of California to investigate "national defense migration." Earlier a parade of JACL leaders had informed the Tolan Committee that the government could count on their complete support should mass eviction and detention of their entire ethnic population be viewed as imperative for prosecuting the war. To this position, whereby loyalty was equated with the sacrifice of rights and accommodation to authority, Omura and Okuma flatly dissented. While the fiercely patriotic Omura agreed with JACLers that subversive actions within the Japanese American community should be reported to government officials, he denigrated their notion that mass evacuation was a necessary evil and disparaged their chauvinistic policy of "constructive cooperation." "I would like," intoned an indignant Omura, "to ask the committee: Has the Gestapo come to America? Have we not risen in righteous anger at Hitler's mistreatment of Jews? Then 3

is it not incongruous that citizen Americans of Japanese descent should be mistreated and persecuted?" On 27 March 1942, the army issued a proclamation declaring that in two days the free movement of Japanese Americans out of the strategic defense areas of the West Coast would be frozen and their enforced movement into assembly centers begun. Omura, who had determined not to linger in San Francisco for internment, fled to the "free zone" of Denver, Colorado, where his wife had already rented space to house Current Life. Unable to continue the magazine's publication, Omura started an employment placement bureau. In addition to assisting Denver's burgeoning war refugee population (Colorado's Ralph Carr was the only Western governor to welcome Japanese Americans) find jobs free of charge, Omura filed several racially discriminatory cases through the War Manpower Commission that led to Nisei defense jobs. To pay his bills, Omura took gardening jobs, worked in a munitions factory, and wrote free-lance articles for Denver's several Japanese vernacular newspapers. On 28 January 1944, he accepted the position of English language editor for one of them, the Rocky Shimpo. Almost a year prior to editing the Rocky Shimpo, Omura had contested the JACL supported Nisei combat unit because it was segregated and, therefore, a symbol of racism. Omura's appointment to his new post closely followed Secretary of War Stimson's announcement about Nisei draft resumption, another policy that Omura knew the JACL had urged upon the overnment. When this measure caused the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee to mushroom, Omura opened the Rocky Shimpo's pages to that organization for news releases. Then, on 28 February 1944, Omura wrote his first editorial about draft reinstitution and the reaction to it by those detained in WRA camps. His concern at this point was not Heart Mountain, but the actions taken at the Granada, Colorado, and Minidoka, Idaho, centers. There draft resistance had been sporadic and punctuated with denunciations of democracy and avowals of expatriation to Japan. Whereas Omura believed that the government should restore a large share of the Nisei's rights before asking them to sacrifice their lives on the battlefield, he could not condone impulsive, reckless, and irresponsible draft resistance. It soon became plain to Omura that the Fair Play Committee represented an organized draft resistance movement dedicated to the principle that citizen Japanese should do their duty as Americans, equally, but not before being treated equally by the U.S. government. Thereafter in his Rocky Shimpo editorials he supported the FPC, not as an organization but solely on the issue of restoration as a prelude to induction. That the Heart Mountain Sentinel, the camp newspaper, was staunchly pro-jacl (and, as such, censorious of the FPC for placing Japanese American loyalty and patriotism at risk) assuredly added fuel to Omura's fiery editorials. These gained members for the FPC and dramatically increased Rocky Shimpo sales in Heart Mountain and the other camps (where, opined Omura, "at least 90 percent of the people... are opposed to the JACL"). But Omura's hard-hitting editorials also caused the government to sever his connection with the paper in mid-april 1944 and then, two months later, prompted the Wyoming grand jury to indict him plus the seven FPC leaders. At the Cheyenne trial involving Frank Emi and James Omura (who was acquitted under the First Amendment constitutional right of "freedom of the press") a third Nisei, Ben 4

Kuroki, was in attendance as a potential government witness. Although not called to testify, Kuroki was interviewed by a Wyoming Tribune reporter at the trial's closing. In the resulting article he branded Emi and his cohorts as "fascists," blasted their activities as "a stab in the back," and bewailed that "they have torn down all [that] the rest of us [Nisei] have tried to do." Considering what Ben Kuroki had accomplished in the war, these words carried great weight. Born and raised in Nebraska, the twenty-five year old Kuroki and his farming family had not been subject like most Japanese Americans to mass eviction and detention. One of a handful of Nisei the Army Air Corps accepted for service, Kuroki overcame immense prejudice against him to become a gunner in thirty perilous bombing missions over Axis North Africa and Europe. Rotated back to the U.S. as the first bona fide Nisei war hero in early 1944, Sergeant Kuroki's canceled appearance on a hit radio show in southern California triggered a cause celebre. Annoyed that this cruel slight had occurred because the network feared the highly decorated Kuroki's ancestry might offend West Coast residents, the elite Commonwealth Club invited him to address them in San Francisco on February 4. Much of Kuroki's talk covered his wartime experiences and how they had deepened his respect for democracy. But before concluding he alluded ruefully to the prejudice he had met in California upon his return from battle: "I don't know for sure that it is safe for me to walk the streets of my own country." Capstoning his oration, Kuroki echoed the JACL Creed-"Though some individuals may discriminate against me, I shall never become bitter or lose faith, for I know that such persons are not representative of the majority of the American people"-and reminded his listeners that Nisei soldiers were proving their loyalty to the United States on the bloody battlefield of Italy. When Kuroki sat down, the 600-plus audience gave him a ten-minute standing ovation. The combat Nisei to whom Kuroki referred were in the 100th Infantry Battalion. Rooted in prewar Japanese American volunteers and draftees in Hawaii, the 100th was activated as a special battalion in mid-june 1942 upon being sent to the mainland for training. Not until late September of the next year, however, did the 100th see duty on the Italian front and suffer its first casualties. In January 1944, the battalion gained a glowing reputation for its stouthearted performance in the Battle of Cassino. This battle and others decimated the battalion's original 1,300 soldiers, and replacements and reinforcements were badly needed. Eventually these troops would be supplied by the all- Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which arrived in Europe in June 1942 and thereafter incorporated the battle-tested 100th as its 1st Battalion. The 442nd, destined to become the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in American military history, was comprised initially of Hawaiian and mainland Nisei who had volunteered for service when the government announced its formation on 1 February 1943. The expectation was that Hawaiian Nisei volunteers would number 1,500 and their mainland counterparts twice that figure. Almost the reverse occurred. In Hawaii, where there was no mass wartime eviction of Japanese Americans, more than 2,600 were inducted (out of the nearly 10,000 who volunteered); on the mainland, only around 800 volunteers were inducted (from the total volunteer pool of approximately 1,250 Nisei in the WRA camps). That so few of the eligible 23,600 draft-age Nisei in the camps had volunteered-at Heart Mountain out of 2,300 eligible men a mere 38 were volunteers-was of dire concern to the 5

War Department, the WRA, and the JACL. Therefore, when the Nisei draft resumed in January 1944, they hoped that those eligible would readily comply with selective service regulations and, if necessary, fight and even die for their country. In April of that year, while FPC draft resistance was still intense at Heart Mountain, the army encouraged by the WRA and the JACL decided to send Kuroki on a morale building tour of three WRA camps, beginning with turbulent Heart Mountain. The partisan Heart Mountain Sentinel paved the way for Kuroki's visit. In its April 8 issue it printed two letters from "outsiders" side by side: the first was from a Caucasian member of Kuroki's bomber team saluting him as a person who had "proved himself as loyal an American as any man who had ever crossed the ocean"; the second letter was from Nisei George Nomura attacking the FPC for its "diabolical plan to evade their undeniable obligation to serve this state [USA]." The front page of the Sentinel's April 22 issue juxtaposed its lead story about the war hero's imminent visit with a smaller item announcing James Omura's ouster as Rocky Shimpo editor; also on this page was a reprinted letter from seven Caucasian members of the Iowa National Guard acclaiming the valor and patriotism of Nisei soldiers from Heart Mountain with whom they had shared the fight against fascist forces in Italy. Kuroki's week-long, end-of-april excursion to Heart Mountain was chronicled in printed accounts and photographs by the Sentinel in its April 29 and May 6 editions as being an unblemished triumph: "Kuroki 'Takes' Heart Mountain." But two private accounts of the Nisei sergeant's visit, even though deriving from a stridently pro-kuroki and anti-fpc perspective, tell a rather different tale. On May I, Heart Mountain's director, Guy Robertson, informed WRA Director Dillon Myer by post that "Sergeant Kuroki was dined and danced and spoke before many different groups, including members of the so-called Fair Play Committee," yet felt compelled to add that on Kuroki's departure day, six more Nisei refused their preinduction examinations. The weekly reports by the camp's community analyst, Asael Hansen, are still more revealing. They indicate that the shy five feet, nine inch, 145 -pound airman's reception at Heart Mountain was a decidedly mixed one. Whereas 3,000 camp residents greeted him, the crowd at a scheduled mid-week address was much smaller than anticipated and hardly anybody gathered for his sendoff. Then, too, while Kuroki's speeches were applauded and he was swarmed over by the camp's adoring children and teenagers, their Japanese alien parents were offended by his completely American ways and point of view on the war (such as his emphatic prediction that "we" will soon bomb Japan). His encounters with Nisei draft resisters, moreover, did not proceed smoothly. Four of them allegedly had a session with him punctuated by this exchange: "What would you do if you were us?" "I'd volunteer for induction." 'So you think it is all right for us to be evacuated and locked up here." On another occasion, following a "quite heated" session between Kuroki and the FPC membership, "a few of the men expressed a strong desire to beat him up." When Kuroki granted the aforementioned interview to the Wyoming Tribune in the wake of the November trial of the FPC leaders and James Omura, he told the reporter about the two sessions that Asael Hansen had documented a half year earlier. On the first occasion the resisters had rationalized their not showing for their draft physicals by 6

quoting laws and the Constitution, though he could tell that "they didn't really understand what they were talking about but had been influenced by others." Convinced that the FPC was the influencing agent, he met with that organization and registered his strong disapproval of their actions. However, they persisted along the same course, culminating in the trial of their "key leaders" that had brought him to Cheyenne as a government witness against them. Before Heart Mountain's November 1945 closure, 85 men were imprisoned for draft law violations, while for all ten WRA camps the total was 315. Averaging twenty-five years in age, the resisters typically served two years in federal prisons before President Harry Truman issued them a blanket postwar pardon. As for the FPC leaders, their verdict and sentencing was overturned on appeal after eighteen months of imprisonment. Not all WRA camp draft resisters were given the same treatment, for it depended on what judge heard their case. For example, Judge Louis Goodman dismissed the indictments against seven Tule Lake, California, draft resisters. "It is shocking to the conscience," he declared, "that an American citizen be confined on the ground of disloyalty and then, while so under duress and restraint, be compelled to served in the armed forces or be prosecuted for not yielding to such compulsion." In spite of substantial draft resistance, the great majority of eligible Nisei men in the WRA camps complied with their orders. Even at Heart Mountain, 700 men reported for their selective service physicals; of these, 385 were inducted, of whom eleven were killed and fifty-two wounded in battle. Totally some 13,500 Nisei men from the ten camps entered the U.S. Army. More than 75 percent of them-or put another way, more than 50 percent of all eligible Nisei males-saw army service in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team during its 225 days of heavy combat in Italy and France in 1944-45. This represented the highest percentage of eligible males of any racial or ethnic group assigned to a World War II combat unit, and this situation resulted in more than 700 deaths and 9,486 casualties. When President Truman received the 442nd on the White House lawn on 15 July 1946, he told them, "You fought not only the enemy but you fought prejudice-and you have won. Ben Kuroki, whose fame was overshadowed by the collective exploits of the "Go For Broke" 442nd, nonetheless stayed in the limelight for several years after his sojourn at Heart Mountain. While there he had announced his intention to fight in Asia-and before long he did. In 1945, he overcame a War Department regulation to become the first and only Nisei to serve in active combat with the Army Air Force in the Pacific theater, participating as a turret gunner on a B-29 in twenty-eight bombing missions over Tokyo and other Japanese cities. When he returned to the United States in early 1946, he was booked into the palatial Waldorf Astoria Hotel and asked to take part with celebrated generals and political leaders in a New York Herald Tribune forum on the war, and his remarks were then published in the Reader's Digest ("The War Isn't Over at Home"). Kuroki also was the subject of a 1946 biography entitled Boy From Nebraska. After traveling around the country on a JACL-endorsed speaking tour, Kuroki married, attended college, and became, in his home state, the first Japanese American editor of a general newspaper. Later he won awards for journalistic excellence when editing a suburban Michigan newspaper before continuing (and ending) his career in southern California. Although not a public figure for most of the postwar years, Kuroki was the invited keynote speaker and honored guest at the December 6, 1991, opening of the 7

Museum of Nebraska's exhibit on Nebraska and World War II. The very next day, the New York Times, in its lead editorial commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, acclaimed Ben Kuroki as an "authentic hero" and linked his wartime accomplishments with those of the legendary 442nd. For resisters like Frank Emi and their supporter James Omura there was no public applause, leastwise not until recently. The JACL's wartime position that the sole way for Nisei to prove their loyalty was through military service, coupled with the extraordinary postwar publicity given the 442nd and the concurrent image construction of Japanese Americans as a model minority, made these men anonymous in mainstream America and social outcasts among their coethnics. Insofar as draft resistance was heard of in the Japanese American community, it was in derogatory terms: "draft dodgers," "pro- Japan," "hot heads," "trouble-makers," and "traitors." Omura's situation was still worse. His "crime" of defending the FPC's position was compounded by his opposition to the JACL's leadership and public policy. Branded a pariah, he was harassed by members of his own community to the point where his employment opportunities dried up and his marriage ended in divorce. Remaining in Denver, he switched from journalism to landscape gardening, remarried, raised a family, and turned his back on other Japanese Americans and their concerns. In the 1970s two University of Wyoming-based professional historians (Roger Daniels and Douglas Nelson) published books based strictly on written public records that dramatized the draft resistance movement at Heart Mountain and treated sympathetically the roles played by the FPC membership and Omura. But it was not until the next decade and the climax of the movement for Japanese American redress and reparations, according to Frank Emi, that their reputation as "demented ogres" was recast within (and even beyond) their community. After Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in 1980, that body held hearings in six major U.S. cities during 1981-82 to investigate matters surrounding the wartime camps and to recommend appropriate remedies. At these hearings, resisters told their stories. In New York, for example, FPC member Jack Tono testified first that the JACL had abandoned the resisters during the war and made their lives miserable thereafter, and then rebuked Ben Kuroki, "our great war hero," for having labeled Frank Emi and the other FPC leaders "fascists" at their 1944 trial. At CWRIC's Seattle hearing, redress activists (most notably, the renowned Chinese American playwright Frank Chin), were surprised to discover James Omura (who they believed dead) not only in attendance but testifying and apparently anxious both to enter the redress fray and to refurbish his and the FPC's reputation. By the time CWRIC had issued its report, Personal Justice Denied, in early 1983, Chin and his Japanese American cohorts had begun exhuming the resisters' buried past by taping oral history interviews with them and by systematically researching pertinent documents both in their personal collections and at institutional archives. Moreover, this same group of activists were primarily responsible for the participation of Omura, Emi, and numerous other resisters in academic symposia and community forums that spotlighted their wartime experiences. Whereas CWRIC judged that the Japanese American evacuation was unjustified (caused not by military necessity, but by race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of 8

political leadership) and recommended a formal apology by Congress to Japanese Americans along with $20,000 payments to each camp survivor), Chin and his widening band of allies were anxious to go beyond the commission's investigation and explore the machinations of the JACL leadership vis-a-vis Omura and the resisters. This task they began in earnest once President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Rights Act of 1988, which enacted into law the CWRIC recommendations. In the interval between 1988 and the present, the draft resisters and James Omura have secured their place in the sun in Japanese American and United States history. Although there continues to be opposition to this historical revisionism, particularly from "old guard" JACL leaders and reactionary patriots, whether or not of Japanese ancestry, the trend is unmistakable. Before his death in 1994 James Omura had been deluged with community, national, and international honors, and proclaimed an American hero in the tradition of Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, and Caesar Chavez. Additionally, Frank Emi (the sole surviving FPC leader) and the resisters from Heart Mountain and the other WRA camps have been memorialized for their wartime role through a profusion of academic and commercial publications, documentary films, and imaginary literature. Their act of civil disobedience, twenty years before the 1960s civil rights movement, is now recognized as a historic benchmark in the U.S. civil rights chronology. Instead of invidious distinctions being made, as before, between the wartime behavior of the members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. they are now styled as being different yet complementary species of praiseworthy Americanism. Implementing the Lesson Prior to teaching this unit, have students read the section in their U.S. history survey textbook devoted to the Japanese American Evacuation. If at all possible, assign Roger Daniels's brief but comprehensive 1993 study, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, as collateral reading. It would also be useful to show one or more relevant documentary films. Stephen Okazaki's Days of Waiting, which is set largely at the Heart Mountain camp, is particularly effective because it deals with the plight of an interned Caucasian woman artist married to a Nisei, and hence speaks to Asian American and non-asian American students alike. Another good documentary film to use is Rae Tajiri's History and Memory, since it communicates how memory preserves the wartime experience of Japanese Americans and can be used to supplement and challenge the historical representation of it in mainstream cultural constructions. A third documentary, Robert Nakamura's Something Strong Within, is good to use because its footage on camp life at Heart Mountain includes Ben Kuroki's 1944 visit there. First, pass out to students copies of the above "Historical Narrative." Then, after they have read this narrative, divide the class into small groups and have them discuss it briefly in general terms. Next, distribute the six handouts to the students and have them review their contents. Finally, as a class, discuss the questions on each of the handouts in sequential order. Bibliography Anderson, Jeffrey W. "Military Heroism: An Occupational [Operational] Definition." Armed Forces and Society 12 (Summer 1986): 591-606. Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob. Telling the Truth About History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. 9

Bodnar, John. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Chin, Frank. 'Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake." In Jeffery Paul Chan et al, eds., The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature. New York: Meridian, 1991. Daniels, Roger. Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. ----------, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War IL New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. ----------, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano, eds. Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986. Drinnon, Richard Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Ehrlich, Gretel. Heart Mountain [novel]. New York: Viking, 1988. Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Hansen, Arthur A. Japanese American World War H Evacuation Oral History Project: Part IV: Resisters. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1995. ----------, "Oral History and the Japanese American Evacuation." Journal of American History 81 (September 1995): 625-39. ----------, "A Riot of Voices: Racial and Ethnic Variables in Interactive Oral History Interviewing." In Eva M. McMahan and Kim Lacy Rogers, eds., Interactive Oral History Interviewing. Hillsdale, NJ.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994. Hosokawa, Bill. JACL in Quest of Justice: The History of the Japanese American Citizens League. New York: William Morrow, 1982. ----------, Nisei: The Quiet Americans. New York, William Morrow, 1969. Ishigo, Estelle [Peck]. Lone Heart Mountain. Las Angeles: Hollywood Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, 1972. Larson, T. A. Wyoming's War Years, 1941-1945. Laramie: University of Wyoming Press, 1954. Lears, T. J. Jackson. 'The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities." American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 567-93. Lee, Joann Faung Jean. Asian Americans: Oral Histories of First to Fourth Generation Americans from China, the Philippines, Japan, India, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam and Cambodia. New York: The New Press, 1991. Mackey, Mike. "Heart Mountain Relocation Center: Both Sides of the Fence." M.A. Thesis, University of Wyoming, 1994. Martin, Ralph G. Boy From Nebraska: The Story of Ben Kuroki. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946. Nelson, Douglas W. Heart Mountain: The History of An American Concentration Camp. Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976. Niiya, Brian, ed. Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present. New York: Facts on File, 1993. Nomura, Gail, et al., eds. Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989. Norkunas, Martha. The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey, California. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Okihiro, Gary Y. Margins and Mainstream: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. Stanford, Michael. A Companion to the Study of History. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. Takaki, Ronald T. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Takezawa, Yasuko I. Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity. Ithaca: 10

Cornell University Press, 1995. Taplin, Ian M. "Why We Need Heroes to be Heroic." Journal of Popular Culture 22 (Fall 1988): 133-42. Tateishi, John. And Justice For All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps. New York: Random House, 1984. Thelen, David, ed. Memory and American History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Weglyn, Michi [Nishiura]. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps. New York: William Morrow, 1976. Wilson, Robert A. and Bill Hosokawa. East to America: A History of the Japanese in the United States. New York: William Morrow, 1980. Arthur A. Hansen is professor of history and director of the Oral History Program and its Japanese American Project at California State University, Fullerton. A specialist on the World War Il eviction and detention experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry, his most recent publication is "Oral History and the Japanese American Evacuation," Journal of American History (September 1995). Reprinted from the Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, Summer 1996. 11